Mark Hamill tweets Malaysian flag by mistake
Image adapted from: @HamillHimself & Star Wars
Most of us know who Mark Hamill is, and if you don’t, the words Star Wars will help ring a bell. He’s been keeping his fans entertained with his meme-filled social media accounts, but a recent political rant he posted got the attention of many Malaysians – but not for the reasons you might think.
In the same tweet that has now gone viral, he mistook the Malaysian flag emoji for the US one – which netizens were quick to catch and respond to.
How it all went down
On 13th January 2020, Hamill took to his Twitter account with over 3.6 million followers to voice his displeasure with Facebook targeting its users with political ads.
Hamill announcing that he deleted his Facebook account with over 900k followers in a tweet that has since garnered 21.5k retweets and 178.6k likes
Image credit: @HamillHimself
The Twitter-sphere was quick to point out that Hamill had tweeted an emoji of the Malaysian flag instead of US’s when trying to make his point that the US valued #PatriotismOverProfits. But we don’t blame him – at a glance, both flags share similar blue rectangles and red-and-white stripes.
Around 4 hours after the original tweet, Hamill corrected himself in a follow-up tweet that corrected the emojis because responses were flooding in over his blunder.
Image credit: @HamillHimself
Malaysian netizens react
Image adapted from: @GoddamnBatman39
There was a roar of comments addressing his political statement, but among the flood of tweets were Malaysians pouring their love for the Jedi’s accidental shoutout. One even said he should’ve “Luked” more carefully.
Image adapted from: @weistudio, @Benyaep, & @Camemberu
Twitter user, @IDreamofHamill, tweeted that she didn’t notice the error with how tiny the emojis were, adding after that she was just happy that he noticed our country and gave attention to it.
Image adapted from: @IDreamofHamill
And for those hardcore Star Wars fans in Malaysia, you’ll like @pearl_sharon’s shoutout to Padawan, Sarawak – which happens to share a name with Jedis-in-training, also called “Padawan” in the movies.
Image adapted from: @pearl_sharon
Another Twitter user also made sure to share our rich culture with the Hollywood actor, tweeting an image of a Luke Skywalker-inspired shadow puppet for the team’s cultural project.
Image adapted from: @fusionwk
#HammyHeartsSoutheastAsia
All the love and responses did not go unnoticed by Hamill. Realising his error and noticing the force of Malaysian Twitter users, he followed up his previous tweets 2 days after:
Image credit: @HamillHimself
“Now that we all have had a good laugh at my expense for mistaking a TEENY-TINY flag of Malaysia for a TEENY-TINY Old Glory-the fact remains the same: NO country measures their worth in [money emoji] (also, I accidentally blundered into a LOAD of Malaysian followers) #HammyHeartsSoutcheastAsia”.
Malaysians hold immense pride for our country, and so we were more than glad when our ole country was given a shoutout by Mark Hamill himself – even though mistakenly. It was a force that we didn’t know we needed until his series of tweets gave Malaysians a good laugh and a reestablished pride in Malaysian boleh.
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